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Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble
I just came up with an idea that could be interesting to Twitter, friendfeed, and Facebook: invisible comments. Wonder if anyone else is thinking along these lines? http://scobleizer.com/2009...
April 20, 2009 - Comment - Share
This is at the bottom of a post about the newspaper industry and how they keep giving the geeks all their meals for free. - Robert Scoble
Robert - Let's do it! - Jim Connolly
Radar.net has this. - Dave Morin
Dave: really? I gotta look again. - Robert Scoble
Dave: do they use it as a command line interface to talk to the search engine? - Robert Scoble
"invisible comments" without reading the post: Isn't that the most pointless feature ever? :D - Meryn Stol
Jim: I'm thinking of doing my own social network with a few other geeks. I have a feeling that's the only way to get what I really want. - Robert Scoble
Count me in. - drew olanoff
Meryn: actually it would be very powerful. You should read the post, or at least the part where I talk about invisible comments (toward the bottom). - Robert Scoble
Robert - If you do, I will happily contribute and cover in the tech news blog!! - Jim Connolly
Yes, Robert, just wanted to point out the strangeness of the term. :) You're talking about reader-contributed metadata. Delicious is doing that. Every link towards a page also is metadata. Yes, in general this is a VERY good thing. There could be far more support for this kind of thing in both browsers and blogging platforms like Wordpress (or plugins). - Meryn Stol
So linking advertising to user generated tags, outside the normal commenting system - Johnny
Meryn: the invisible comments could also be machine generated, just like EXIF data on photographs are (my camera makes those and Flickr displays that data). - Robert Scoble
I mentioned this a bit awhile back when I was saying hashtags were a hack and unnecessary. I agree with you - each of these networks really needs an accompanying meta layer of some sort to categorize data. - Jesse Stay
CURIOUS: Could the use of invisible data be REALLY easy for spammers to manipulate? - Jim Connolly
Robert, are you familiar with Microformats? - Meryn Stol
Can we set physical comments to "inaudible?" - Craig Brownell
Regarding the free lunch being given to Craigslist, we had many meetings about this at Media General while I was there about this (I was in charge of moving their print classifieds to online formats). The Newspapers still have a in on this that even Craigslist can't attack - they have strong relationships with local stores, auto dealers, and more that they can tie to classifieds listings. It was my job there to find ways to work with this data. IMO they still haven't done enough. - Jesse Stay
Forgot the link to my meta article: http://staynalive.com/article... - Jesse Stay
Ahhhh... So if you made a post about, say, wanting a new bike, the comments that would come back with user reviews would prompt a script to locate a price and location for purchasing each one of those reviewed bikes. That way you can pick the best one, purchase it instantly and the 'machine' can take a cut as a revenue source? - Johnny
For a site like FriendFeed, it would be better to just add support for tagging by readers. Adding support for RDF triplets would be a next step, but simple alphanumeric tags (like Delicious) already would go very far. - Meryn Stol
Would posters have the option to create their own metatags of any kind, or are these a preset bunch in your idea Robert? - Colin
On the other hand, putting everything inside plain-text fields (which the comment field could be used for) allows for any kind of metadata to be embedded. One could even add a JSON or XML string. - Meryn Stol
Search can be made far more powerful if you know the kind of metadata stored though. - Meryn Stol
i do like the idea of putting meta-comments that are machine readable, not for humans - although i would not put it as comments, more have a "tag" option perhaps, that people can collaboratively dump info in - Iphigenie
Colin: posters could do their own, but really that would be pretty geeky to do. I imagine developers would give us UIs to do invisible ones. Things like "set location of this tweet." Imagine if we had the ability to do that! Then I could search for "show all tweets about New York plane crash, but only show me tweets done from New York." - Robert Scoble
Joelle: invisible comments wouldn't be displayed as comments. It's more like a command line interface to the object you are typing into. - Robert Scoble
FWIW about a year ago Alex inferred they were talking about this at Twitter on the API team. Of course, not much has changed in a year so I don't expect to see it. - Jesse Stay
I've been pushing this for awhile now - maybe it is time we just do it ourselves. - Jesse Stay
I think that there are quite a few people thinking along these lines. The key is to make it interoperable across the various microblogging platforms. If it was done in a way to be compatible with all of those, and implemented in a client, it could be added to other data sources (like blogs) and be pushed out to aggregators (like FriendFeed) which could be read by the same clients. The clients would need an access/authentication protocol to allow the entry of metadata. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Honestly, we should really get Evan Prodromou in on this discussion. He has funding, and the vision to lead something like this using his already existing framework. Although he is at the super secret #swfoo so he's inaccessible ATM - Jesse Stay
Designing the protocol for this is probably the easier part. The more difficult part is getting buy-in to a standard from the client software developers. I'm in though. I still maintain this is better developed as a client protocol rather than trying to get the microblogging platforms to support it via API. The less it depends on the platform the more widely used a single protocol could be -it could be used for all kinds of different data types from tweets to blogs and more. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Rob, the advantage to using Laconi.ca as a base and extending it is they already have client developers working on software. - Jesse Stay
Jesse: cool as long as we do it here. We need the improved comment area and live chat ability that friendfeed affords. - Robert Scoble
If you use laconica it still has the problem of being developed in a platform dependant way (the same as waiting for twitter to put it in) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Dave Winer deserves credit for pushing me to this realization, by the way, and he will be involved in anything I do. - Robert Scoble
Robert, I'm just saying we already have a base we can build upon that's Open Source and based on open standards. We can either fork it or extend it if Evan P. supports the idea. It's a start at least. The other option is to build on top of either Buddy Press as a base, or SixApart's new software, or JaikuEngine. They're all good starts at least. - Jesse Stay
I agree Dave should be involved - FTR I pushed it before he did though ;-) - Jesse Stay
Jesse: agreed, definitely will go with an open source choice. - Robert Scoble
@Robert Couldn't the %%0 invisible="" be abused for search gaming? - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Neal, I think some sort of trust ranking would be useful to get around that - users could be rated by their peers and those with higher peer rankings would appear higher in the search. I think that would get around that, and still accomplish what Robert's trying to do - feature the people that use the service above others. - Jesse Stay
So I guess we're stealing from Plurk in that manner ;-) - Jesse Stay
Neal: yes, but why couldn't the owner of the node (in this case, me) see all invisible comments and delete those that aren't good? - Robert Scoble
@Robert: Not a scalable solution. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Robert, true, but you'd soon need an Akismet-like engine then. - Meryn Stol
Neal: wrong. That is EXACTLY the system that exists here for visible comments. Meryn: wrong. - Robert Scoble
Taking the reputation of the "commenter" into account is better I think... A kind of pagerank-like solution. Comments by people with low rank wouldn't count for much, might even be ignored by default. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: you don't need to do anything more than what friendfeed has already done. I should do a blog post on why. - Robert Scoble
Why not explain it here first, then I can should at it. :) - Meryn Stol
Meh, I don't like being blinded by PR's success as a model. I think there are inherent problems to self-reinforcing ranking models. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
I need more than 288 characters to explain why decentralized moderation is the most brilliant thing friendfeed has done to date. - Robert Scoble
Neal, you know anything better then? - Meryn Stol
decentralized moderation is the same as with blogs... And wordpress doesn't have Akismet for nothing. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: blogs and Akismet are not decentralized moderation and participation on blogs doesn't have a built in reputation system as they do here. - Robert Scoble
Blogs ARE decentralized moderation. Every blog owner moderates his own blog's comments. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: not nearly as decentralized as here. - Robert Scoble
No, honestly, I have been thinking about the problem since it came up in conversation with @technosailor at wordcamp last year. It's a logical problem, not a code problem. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Robert, what's the difference then? - Meryn Stol
Neal: I'm writing a blog about why it's different. Meryn, be back in 15 minutes. GIve me a chance to explain why friendfeed is FAR different than blog moderation. - Robert Scoble
ok :) - Meryn Stol
how do you know they are not already being used?? - Max Rosenthal
Robert: I think I get what you are saying. The invisible tags would be caught and moderated similar to any other commenting, but should be machine-read for other purposes. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Neal: right. - Robert Scoble
Robert, you left me hanging on something you brought up. “Now, why does the New York Times make it easier to find the front page of the paper the day they reported the Titanic sank? Hint: they have this figured out in a way that Twitter and others just don’t.” How do they do it? What’s up with SkyGrid? You left that one hanging, too. - Michael Fidler
Michael: well, the New York Times cares about archives, for one, and adds metadata to everything so that important stuff can be found again when someone needs to find it. As for SkyGrid, see ya at 4 p.m. Pacific Time today for a live press conference about it. - Robert Scoble
Max: I'm sure there are a few invisible things that we don't know about. I just want a public API put on them! :-) - Robert Scoble
@Robert I don't think an API would be that hard to do, it's really just meta-tagging+microformats with a tag-like front end, or am I completely misunderstanding you? - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Robert, seen this recent piece on RWW? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... - Meryn Stol
Neal: you are putting engineering talk on it, but I think that's pretty close. I tend to not like the engineering talk nor do I like structured data that much. I like commenting. And invisible comments with a somewhat structured API would be very cool. - Robert Scoble
Meryn: that post on RWW is very close to what I'm talking about here. Those guys are so smart. - Robert Scoble
Robert, what's your gripe with "structured data"? Saying (for example) "price=1000USD" in a comment is structured data as well, just expressed in plain text. Maybe your gripe is with the clumsy interfaces? All kinds of dropdown boxes and multiple text fields can indeed be a pain. - Meryn Stol
Robert: So what would you like it to be implemented as? A plugin for a blog? It seems like what would end up happening is that the invisible comments would end up injected from the front end into the page when the page next rendered, basically like commenting on comments. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Meryn: some things, yes, need to be structured, like that. I was thinking more of metatags. I think they are massively stupid in such a world. Here's a metatag: foobar. Now I can search for this item just by using "foobar" in the search here. But there are some places where more structured stuff is better. I just try to resist structure as much as possible because it tends to make things harder to use and less flexible. - Robert Scoble
%%0 comment="this would be an invisible comment if my system were implemented" - Robert Scoble
Neal: the moment I hit post on that it would turn a different color and whatever API was there would be enacted. - Robert Scoble
Neal: this would be implemented by friendfeed (or my own social network) itself. So the comment box would become a little code run window, too. - Robert Scoble
Robert, yes, too much structure hurts usability, and often doesn't add much value. The idea of less structure was also the basis for tags on Delicious. Plain alphanumeric tags have proved to be extremely powerful. Hierarchies or controlled vocabularies seem unnecessary. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: exactly. - Robert Scoble
Robert, how about an additional input box for those "invisible comments"? Saves you typing the "%%0 comment=".,, Or a checkbox to make a comment invisible. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: again, that would be the UI developer's job to decide. Here on friendfeed? No, not appropriate. Too complex. On TweetDeck or Twhirl? Maybe. - Robert Scoble
I like one box that does lots of things. Like Google Chrome. - Robert Scoble
@Robert Hmm...I see what you are saying. And then a search engine could pull using the tag variations. The search side would be a lot like Backtype. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Open up Google Chrome. Type: 2+2= and hit return. - Robert Scoble
Google Chrome is what I call "a magic box." The comment box here could be "a magic box" too. - Robert Scoble
Robert. Yes i see your point. I too like as much as intelligence as possible. - Meryn Stol
Neal: something like that. We will soon have real time search. We need to be able to talk to the search engine in real time too. - Robert Scoble
Well what about natural language parsing then? For simple sentences, that's quite possible nowadays. - Meryn Stol
Meryn: yeah. Have you seen Google Calendar? Add a new item there sometime. You just type something like "appointment with dad on december 25, 2009 10 am to noon." It figures it out. It's magic. - Robert Scoble
I love magic. - Robert Scoble
It takes a lot of engineering-talk to make all that magic happen :p So you want them to be completely free-form? That wasn't how it seemed in your post, and cutting out the data into an ontology specific for each site would be useful. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Robert, yes, I think we're on the same page now. :) There's still a problem with actually hiding something though... You really need special syntax for that. But then I think I'd choose for - say - a back-tic "`" (or two) in front of a comment. But being able to do it through keyboard only is indeed nice. You could also say that "ctrl-enter" posts something as hidden, while "enter" makes a regular post. - Meryn Stol
Neal: no, not completely free form. Some things need to be structured, other things need to be magic. :-) - Robert Scoble
Meryn is right, it needs some sort of syntactic or executable switch that injects the text to the API, something similar to how http://socialmedian.com uses @ mentions in their comments. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons
I posted on your blog but it seems like the discussion is really happening here... what you describe is basically implemented in flickr's machine tags: http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Janek Mann
Janek: yeah, I saw that on the blog too, thanks! Very very similar, yes. - Robert Scoble
So basically, flickr stole this lunch from the newspapers also. ;) - Meryn Stol
Meryn: yeah, but Flickr hasn't implemented it in a way that makes discussing movies, restaurants, items, etc possible to monetize. - Robert Scoble
Here's my post about decentralized comments: http://scobleizer.com/2009... - Robert Scoble
Neal had posted a comment regarding how to implement this - "as a plugin for a blog?" -This is exactly what I'm driving at -The primary portion of the data would be implemented client side, and transported via any popular social networking platform, including via blog plugin. For ease of use a service would act as the search clearinghouse for the invisible data - this service (or services) would be easily monetized by having "the valuable" data. But the clients need not depend on the clearinghouse service - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
They could access the data directly as it was stored in its "natural" 140character state, and access it via the normal search routines for the originating platform (twitter, identi.ca, FF, FB etc) The clearinghouses would become viable businesses, by providing authentication for makers of invisible comments, and/or sleuthing out the valuable comments via search. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
No, the Internet should be public and accountable and not littered with invisible metatags that others can manipulate. - Prokofy Neva